Featured

3 checkpoints to help coach youth pitchers

Pitching is one of the most simple looking, complicated things in all of sports.
On the surface, it looks like you just windup and chuck it. Some parents down at your local field may think “some kids got it and some kids don’t”. But what I’ve been able to do the last 10 months proves that statement wrong. While genetics definitely play a role at young ages, quality coaching and developing has a major effect. Research is pretty clear on a few things. First, coordination, balance, and rhythm all improve with coaching. Second, throwing velocity is improved with training. If you learn to move more efficiently, gain core and lower body strength, and train the arm to move fast you can dominate at the youth level as a thrower. Once you become a great thrower you need to learn the art of pitching. This article will detail an easy to follow method that includes checkpoints to help a dad on the weekend or a coach with his young team.

It’s tough to win a race with a bad start

Posture and positions are the two key things I’ve learned to focus on when coaching pitchers. This isn’t from my brain, but from pitching coaches smarter than myself that I’ve had the fortune of spending time around. If you get into a bad position early in the throw, it’s unlikely you have a good end result. There are players talented enough to compensate for a bad start. But, compensating this way will lead to breaking down sooner in your career. Instead of relying on compensating at the end of each throw, the better long term strategy is learning a few key positions . These key positions are easy to coach and don’t take away the unique movements that make each pitcher special. Lift, land, finish. At older ages, the only extra cue I add is “drift”. Lift, drift, land, finish. Some kids may only need “drift, finish” while others may need “land, finish”. It’s up to you as a coach to know how your athlete learns and pick which cues make the most sense to that pitcher.

3 key positions to coach

High point in the knee

This position is wherever the top point of the lead knee is. We can’t say some uniform height for all because each kid is different and not all pitchers have the same range of motion in the hip. So, whatever their comfortable “high point” is that is repeatable and with little effort is optimal. Down the road, this may change. For now, less complicated is best.

Coach’s cue: “Pick your front leg up to a high point. Once you hit that high point, now we start the throw.”

Lead leg landing

The next important benchmark for me as a coach is what posture my pitchers have when their lead leg lands. Are they falling over out of control? Do they have a good foundation underneath them? Are they stable enough in their lower half to accelerate their upper half? Where is the chin and chest in relation to the lead knee? Is the arm loose or flexed tight? Have the hips already rotated open or are they closed ready to rotate? These are important questions to ask each time the front foot lands because of the implications they have on the result of the throw. If the chin and chest are already over the front leg, we have collapsed too early. If the hips have already rotated, the throw is going to be all upper half. If the arm is stiff and flexed the arm won’t be able to move fast like we need it. If the arm is in a bad position, the ball will not be out on time. Some pitcher makes a late correction and somehow throw a strike. But more often than not, these landing issues will lead to lower percentage results. So, it’s important to learn even at young ages, that the front foot landing is a key checkpoint.

Coach’s cue: Feel the front leg land. Try to keep the chin and chest behind the front foot until it’s time to go.

Finish your throw

Another common issue I see with youth pitchers is at the end of their throw. Instead of bending at the waist to finish the throw, they stay upright and stiff. This is the pitcher that does a full windup, looks good halfway down, and then gets stuck. Instead of continuing momentum downhill, they pull the e-brake and come to a screeching halt. Visually, it looks like the pitcher slams into a wall as the ball rolls off the hand. Some of you reading may remember the old towel drill. By tying one end of a small towel into a knot, you can go through your motion holding the towel and pop it out front. This drill helps to understand how the finish should feel. While it’s not my go-to drill, it has helped certain pitchers gain a better understanding. Finishing tall stops the energy and momentum created at the earlier checkpoints. So, we need to see the shoulders finish over the front leg. Don’t complicate this.

Coach’s cue: Chin and chest finish over the front foot as you reach you reach the ball out to the catcher’s glove.

My goal of the article wasn’t to complicate pitching. Again, this is a combination of what I’ve seen that last year coaching pitchers and being around coaches with more knowledge than myself. Giving kids easy to remember checkpoints has given me the best results. Our focus when developing young pitchers should not be making them think so much they can’t be an athlete. These checkpoints can work for a dad taking their kid down or a coach during bullpens with their team.

We aren’t making robots

I want to remind you that each pitcher doesn’t need to look the same. We aren’t coaching pitchers to be robots. If pitcher A looks different than pitcher B it doesn’t mean they are bad or incorrect. Chris Sale would never have thrown like he does if his little league coach made him throw like Greg Maddux. Randy Johnson was dominant throwing different than Clayton Kershaw. We have to accept that each motion is unique and celebrate that. Often times, the kid who throws more unconventional gets more outs. Remember, if we were watching pitching 40 years ago it would look more like Satchel Paige than Jacob Degrom.

“Hey kid you’re gonna hurt your arm like that”

Little league coaches today may have looked at a young Walter Johnson and said “don’t throw like that it will hurt your arm”. Why do we associate funky deliveries with arm trouble with no research to back the statement? Arm slots are not nearly as damaging to kids as pitching both days of a weekend travel ball tournament. So why the fuss? We associate arm health to being conventional. Often times, forcing a 3/4 arm slot to throw more over top is creating more arm trouble than fixing it. Not to mention that 3/4 arm slot with arm side run became flatter and may even make them less effective as a pitcher. We have to tread carefully when changing the natural movement signature of kids. Instead, can we focus on the body delivering the arm on time?

Take home message:

  • High point in the knee
  • Stable landing with the front leg to accept weight
  • Finish with the shoulders over the front side

If these things happen in sequence, typically the answer is yes. Practice that over and over until each pitcher at least has a basic understanding of each checkpoint. Sometimes the answer is that the kid doesn’t have the strength to hold certain positions. In that case, I highly recommend getting onto a strength program to enhance the physical capabilities of the athlete. Yelling the same thing over and over won’t get the result to change. Mobility, balance, coordination, strength, power are all things to work on outside of specific pitching practice.

If this article was helpful, please like and share with someone else that may get something from it.

Featured

BE A GREAT TEAMMATE – Rant to follow

Excuse the rant.

I was born in 1989 and watched baseball in the 90’s when Cal Ripken set a record for consecutive games played in the thousands. I watched players like Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs successfully demolish records without bat flipping. Baseball was about scoring more runs than the other team. Now it feels like, at least at the youth level, we are celebrating individual accomplishments more than the team’s. Travel baseball requires parents to drive a few hours and pay a lot of money to watch their son or daughter play the game. Because of that, they hope to see that specific kid play well. If not, most likely it would have been an unsuccessful trip. Who cares if the team does well, if their kid performs poorly it was a waste of a weekend. This is what baseball is starting to become.

What I’m starting to fear travel ball is promoting is each and every kid needs to worry about their own stats more than how the team performs. Baseball, a game played with 8 other kids on the field, is a game where every person can contribute in ways that never show on the box score. You could have zero hits in a game and still make a diving catch to win. Unfortunately, the routine play isn’t Instagram worthy. You can’t just make the play, it needs to be viral. With some travel ball coaches choosing to make the lineups based on previous statistics, it’s no wonder kids are starting to adapt. Tournaments provide a post game report on each game and shout out individual accomplishments. This isn’t your local paper once in a while, this is an every weekend routine with tournaments being played year round. Can anyone tell me why 8 year old’s have to be reminded what their batting average is after every game? Did they specifically ask for those stats? If not, then who is it really for?

Since when did we start keeping batting averages this early? These underdeveloped young kids are learning the lesson that you better raise the average right now or you won’t play next game. Does that sound like long term development to you? Are these 8 year old’s playing for a world series ring? Not the plastic rings you get for a weekend tournament, the kind that is made with real diamonds that you earn by playing the best players in the world. Will they even want to play baseball long enough to compete for a world series ring if this is the type of environment baseball is for them?

My concern is that kids are learning that your statistics matter more than the team’s. If you go 4-4 and your team loses by 8, you did good. If you go 0-4 and your team wins 3-1, you did poorly. This form of affirmation can only lead to further problems as that player progresses through the ranks and gets to higher levels. I’ve seen this type player in minor league baseball. The team is up by 5, they strike out, they come into the dugout and throw their helmet and break their bat in the hallway because THEY are struggling. Who cares what the team is doing, I didn’t do what I wanted to do so I get to be mad. Meanwhile, the team is on fire and having one of the best games of the year. It’s selfish and it starts way before minor league baseball. At that point, who could blame them? They’ve been in a rat race since diapers and this is the product.

I’ll end this rant with a question:

Why does that kid HAVE to be good right now?

Great athletes from other sports get drafted into pro baseball every year. How is it that the kid that only plays football in high school gets drafted higher than the kid that played travel ball his whole life? Tens of thousands of dollars spent on travel baseball with yelling and fighting and disappointment just so the running back that runs a 6.4 60-yard time can come out his senior year and get drafted higher. My point is it’s not that big of a deal yet. Please, can we shift the focus from what that one kid does to how to the team performed? Let’s pick each kid up when they fail and teach them that there are plenty of ways to contribute besides the box score. If you strike out, go tell your teammates what you saw at the plate. If you miss a fly ball, get ready to pick the team up next at bat at the plate. Learn to get over mistakes quicker so your team doesn’t spend 15 minutes cheering you up in the dugout. In essence, learn to be valuable DESPITE your box score!

BE A GREAT TEAMMATE!

Featured

A curriculum based approach to youth baseball -Part 1

Like every year for the past seven, I was making my way to a spring training site excited for the opportunities and possibilities that were ahead. Another season, new players, same plan as the year before. Develop players to become better athletes and men. The feeling of walking into the clubhouse as spring training starts is such an incredible thing. The energy of the staff and atmosphere is one I have become familiar with. There are no wins and losses at the point, only optimism of what is to come. Schedules are being drawn up and folks are settling in.


As you unpack your bag, familiar faces come over to check in and see how the offseason went. I enjoy this part the most. We become so busy over the next four weeks that it’s impossible to get this type of time for catching up. As we get situated and map out a game plan, we gear up for what is the grind of spring training. Except, this one was not to be. A few days in, before we could even get a rhythm, the talk of Covid-19 shutting down camp became a reality. Within a weeks time, our entire staff was back home feeling like the last few days were a blur.


Once you learn the routine of spring training your brain gets wired a certain way. You know the long mental grind and prepare for it in the months leading up to it. With quarantine in full swing, most of my friends within baseball started working on projects. As time passed, those projects became more detailed and refined. I dove into sprint and jump training and decided I would make myself a guinea pig. I put myself through book after book trying to further my understanding of how to increase accelerative qualities. Notice I said “acceleration” and not “speed”. After so many years of watching the game, I have refined my approach to sprint training. In the context of baseball, I want to train players to go “0-60” in the shortest amount of time possible. This may not help someone beat Usain Bolt in a 100m race, but it will beat the throw to second base on a steal.


As time went on, my desire to coach athletes grew. I decided to work with some youth baseball players in the area. It is incredible how different that was after being at the pro level for so long. Duh, right? While pro players may have one thing they need to work on, youth players have a much longer list. They are also victims of time. Time will improve many things that training cannot. You can hit a million baseballs and still not improve more than what puberty will provide. Baseball requires skill and technique, but it also requires strength and size. Google “MLB exit velocity leaders'” and you will find almost everyone in the top 10 is over 225 pounds. This comes at no surprise to folks that understand what it takes to hit a baseball very far. This is, among other reasons, why players even consider performance enhancing drugs. Bigger, stronger can lead to farther.


As I began working with youth players, stories of their team coaches surfaced. Pitching usage, lineup cards, game situations, and coaching decisions were some of the topics. These coaches tasked with developing young kids seemed to have one thing in mind: winning. I noticed each player’s experience was different depending on what coach they had. Kids playing for a coach with more experience showed better profiency at the fundamentals. Others had coaches that ran practices with no itinerary. How could this be? This led me down a rabbit hole of questions:

  • Why doesn’t player A know how to do this basic skill while player B does?
  • At what age/level does this basic skill get taught?
  • Why didn’t the previous coaches for player A teach this basic fundamental skill?
  • Why is one coach neglecting important skills needed to play the game at a higher level? Who checks to make sure the kids have learned these skills before they move up?

These basic questions led me to make comparisons. When you drop your child at school, you expect him to learn the things needed to progress to the next level. In school, they call each level a grade. To move on to third grade, you need to show competency of second grade requirements. These requirements are tested and developed with strategies and lesson plans. Parents trust teachers know how to develop those second grade skills. So why are sports different? When a parent drops a kid off at youth baseball practice, how do they know the coach is capable? Teachers go to school for education and continue to learn their craft. Coaches sign a paper and are in charge of such development with possibly no education. It is the wild wild west. Your son or daughter may know as much about the sport at the end of the year as they did to begin. Now, one year older, they move up to more difficult levels. Are they ready?


This, to me, is a huge issue.


In the pro setting, which I understand is different, has requirements to move on. Each player has a plan that outlining what needs to improve to move up the ladder. We do this in school. We do this in business. We do this in many walks of life. Yet in youth baseball, where tons of dollars are poured into, we do not. This is as sad as it is maddening.


Earlier this year, I wrote a post about developing a youth player like building a house. At younger ages, we should be laying a foundation that will allow the player to build the walls and roof. Before you run, you learn to walk. Before you learn to hit home runs, do you make consistent contact? Before you pitch in a game, can you throw a strike? To play a game, kids need to know the rules enough for minimal interruption. Before a kid moves up to more advanced play, does he or she understand where each position plays? Do they know how to run the bases? Do they understand the rules enough to play it without explanation? Are these checked off before advancing each level? Instead, you are dropping your kid off hoping for the best. The unfortunate part is parents don’t know to ask these things. “He’s the baseball coach so I’m sure he is covering that”.


Another issue with youth baseball is the difficulty to find good coaches. My dad coached my brothers and I for close to 15 years. Was it easy for him to work a full day and then show up at the field ready to teach young men how to be successful? No. Is that possible for other dads? Not always. There are some great coaches out there that don’t have the time to work for free. I get it and am not shaming anyone for that. I don’t work for free and if you are excellent at your career neither should you. What I am suggesting is putting together a simple to follow, detailed curriculum to give any coach that signs up a guide of what to teach. A dad with no playing experience would have an idea of where to start. Sample practice schedules, easy drills to use, skills needed to cover.


Travel baseball machines thrive on promising, “If you pay x amount of dollars your kid will get superior exposure”. By playing against other good teams, your kid should improve more right? The problem is that’s like a teacher saying, “If you pay x amount of dollars, we will give your son the test to pass third grade as much as you want”. He gets more and more familiar with the test the more he takes it. But, he never learned the problem solving strategies necessary to answer any question that comes up later in life. It was the problem solving skills he needed, not the stamp that says pass. Travel baseball allows you to test your skills, but practicing allows you to improve the skills. Yes, most of this feels like common sense. But after this pandemic, my experiences have shown me that this is not so common after all.


I am in no way saying I have every answer. There are so many brilliant coaches in the game of baseball at every level, most of them smarter than myself. I write this because I was a young kid playing the game with questions. When is the right time to learn how to hit home runs? When should I focus on my lead leg landing when I pitch? What is the best way to make a strong throw from the outfield? At different times of my career I had different questions. But what if we actually put this into a lesson plans for each level? That would take out the guess work and allow each kid to have the basic levels of understanding before advancement. Good players would excel, but the lower tier players would have exposure to the concepts. Development should happen from the moment they pick up a baseball and it shouldn’t be a luck of the draw depending on the coach you get.


I’m inviting any baseball minds smarter than my own to help develop this. My hope is that in a few years this is something on paper and available for youth baseball coaches. This may exist in some form, but not enough for the coaches in my neighborhood to know about it. That needs to change. I want every kid that doesn’t have the money for private lessons to know how to hold a bat to bunt. Paid lessons should allow for improving weaknesses and harnessing strengths individual to each athlete. But fielding a ground ball correctly? That shouldn’t be something you have to pay for private lessons to learn.


This is part 1 of a series. I hope this was beneficial and gets your wheels turning like it did mine. Comment below with any questions and thanks for taking the time to read!

Featured

Improving the way your team prepares

Youth sports continue to grow at an incredible rate year after year. Instead of recommending that kids play multiple sports, we add more games to the schedule and make it mandatory to stick to one. More games during the year means more practices, more at bats, more innings pitched. On top of that, it’s getting ridiculously competitive at the youngest levels. The other day I saw a team had to pay to get someone to do a “scouting report” of their team at 10 years old. I’ll save my feelings on that for another post. What I aim to do with this post is share a couple ways that youth coaches can improve the way their team prepares for sport.

Throughout my time in professional sports, I’ve learned one very important rule. You have to spend time preparing to play. I am talking to the coaches that have their players roll out of bed and go right into playing games. I am talking to the coaches that have their players walk into a batting cage and take hacks 5 seconds later. Great organizations, great teams, great players prepare to play the game. A great coach I had the pleasure of working with once said, “you warm-up to hit, not hit to warm-up”. That quote stuck with me and I hope if you take anything from this post it is that.

Here are a few ways to organize your pre-game or pre-practice warm-up to get the most bang for your buck:

A) Start with general movements that take the players joints through the ranges of motion required in the sport:

The prep drill shown above is a walking lunge with your arms overhead. A sport like baseball is mostly unilateral in nature with hitting, running, and throwing all requiring you to be in a split stance. By taking the hip and shoulder joint through full ranges of motion, you are preparing the player for more optimal working conditions. Now, when a player goes to throw or swing in practice, their body is more familiar with that position. It is amazing how much progress some of the young athletes I’ve trained can make in a short amount of time with a dynamic warm-up. Coordination is typically lacking in a youth athlete and this a great way of improving it. Practicing things like lunges/squats helps them become more balanced and stable as well as gain a little bit of strength in the process.

B) Improve athletic ability with a few plyometric based activities

Once your athletes have done some quality movement, it would be great to follow that up with something athletic and explosive. As a strength coach, I don’t want my athlete’s first run or jump to be in competition. We want to prepare the body so that the team is ready from the first whistle or pitch. So, follow part one with some skips, hops, jumps, and bounds. Be careful and put some thought into which drills you select based on the level you coach. For example, if I am working with a very young baseball player I need to start with slower movements and spend time teaching. This athlete may not know how to run, jump, land correctly yet so I need to build in very basic drills first. If I’m working with a professional athlete, we can select more complicated drills.

Shown to the right is a single leg plyometric skip drill that I use often in my own training. This is for more advanced athletes as it requires more balance and unilateral strength. When working on sprinting or jumping drills, you want to create as much force as possible in as short amount of time as possible. Speed kills in any sport and you need to dedicate time to practicing the technique. A warm-up is a great place to do that at any level.

I recommend at least 3-4 drills, 2-3 sets of 4-5 reps for each one. Be present as a coach and be sure to keep things basic until your athletes show they have mastered the drill.

C) Game speed or agility should be the final component

Now that you have gone through necessary ranges of motion performed some plyometric athletic drills I recommend you finish with some sport-specific game speed drills. Don’t confuse the plyometric drills from before with this. Those drills are intended to focus on technique while this section is more about locking it in for the actual competition. In Part B, you can practice where your arms need to be or where your foot makes contact with the ground. Part C is all about running at the speed you need to play the game. Don’t overthink this section, just have your athletes run 4-5 game speed sprints or possibly do 4-5 reps of a change of direction drill. Hopefully you will see a couple of the players applying the work from part B into their sprints. It’s all about preparing the body so that they are ready to run full speed in the first quarter or inning.

Take home message:

  • Having a 10-15 minute warm-up pre-game and pre-practice is vital to the health and development of your team
  • Organize your warm-up into three sections (Joint Prep, Plyometric, Game Speed)
  • Make sure the coaching staff is present during this time. You can learn a lot about a player from watching them prepare
  • Remind players that a warm-up is as much mental prep as it is physical
  • Challenge your players in the warm-up so that they are ready for the demands of competition. Sprint/cut hard a few times at the end
  • Warm-up to play, don’t play to warm-up

For more information on a dynamic warm-up, here is a link to a detailed video I did to provide any youth coach or team a guideline to follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P8-JRZkw1U&t=2s

Please leave comments below with any questions about this article. I have a few spots available for online coaching at the time of posting this and would be happy to do consulting work for a team looking to take a step up in what they offer.

Featured

Building your own house

As a coach, I’m drawn to using analogies as a way to describe the complex nature of developing athletes. For some reason it provides clarity finding connections with seemingly unrelated things. On the one hand, coaching athletes SHOULD be simple. We are servant leaders there to help reach their potential, right? As well all know, it’s never that simple. Psychology, anatomy, physiology, kinesiology and communication are some of the many things we need to understand to be effective.

It’s a tricky task and something that I am still learning to be better after almost 8 years. This past year was a great learning experience. After working with a very young group of athletes, a thought popped in my head. I’ve finally been able to find the words to paint the picture with enough detail to explain to you.

Some truths I’ve learned over time:

  • At the end of the day, a player’s career is his own and as coaches we serve to help them reach their goals and potential.
  • Our belief system may be correct, but it is not the player’s belief system.
  • Forcing your beliefs and way of life onto a player or coworker is never going to get the result you want.
  • It’s more effective to meet them where they are and work together to cut through the complex forest to find a path. It may not be the path you would go, but it’s the path you are going together. We are there to help navigate, cut away problematic things in the way and provide support when things aren’t going well.

Fascinated by effective communication, I’ve modified my approach towards coaching.
Some common questions asked by young players looking for the secret sauce are:

  • What is the fastest way to get scouted and drafted?
  • What exercise makes me throw harder?
  • What supplement can I take to get bigger?
  • What do the pros do that I can do now to get a step ahead?

My answer used to be long and detailed because I assumed more information for them was better. Why not give them the answer my knowledge base tells me is correct? Am I not helping by giving them tons of scientifically backed information?

Short answer, no you are not.

Youth athletes want the easy way. They want the fast way. If you give them the long way, they will YouTube someone that will give them the incorrect faster way. So, you’re faced with a situation where a player needs the right answer, but doesn’t want to hear it right now. This is the art of coaching. Find out where your athletes are mentally and adapt to what will be understood by your audience.

I choose an analogy of building a house. Growing up, my dad was involved with construction and always had blueprints around. He would say that a good blueprint and plan from the start means you’re more likely to have a solid house in the end. Little things can be fixed, but if you lay a crappy foundation that house is doomed from the start. Athletic development is pouring the concrete slab and drawing up a blueprint for a new house. We are setting the foundation an athlete will have underneath them going forward. Skipping practices, missing workouts, and giving less than their best lays an uneven foundation. By setting high expectations and holding them to those standards we have a better chance that house is going to last for many years.

I use the mantra, “Build your own house”, because athletes are running their own race. Many sports have a team aspect to them, but athletes are primarily focused on developing themselves. I love the concept of extreme ownership because I’ve seen it work well firsthand. If everyone took responsibility and said “I could have done my role better tonight” we lose the finger pointing and start growing as a group.

In this house analogy, the team is the neighborhood. Each individual player has a house along the street. We want the neighborhood to be one that everyone wants to be a part of. To do that, every single house along that street needs to be pristine on the inside and outside. If each player has laid a great foundation, done the little things right, and put in the sweat and labor we have ourselves a great place to live. By challenging each player to build their own house, you are allowing them to make their own blueprint and take ownership over their careers. Young players want to live in a mansion when they haven’t created a blueprint. They want what they see, but don’t know where to start. Our job is to help them through that process. We are the expert builders, but they are the one’s that will be living in it when it’s finished.

Right now they are living in a rickety piece of plywood that would blow over at the first sign of a storm. So, let’s help them get out of the shack and into the house of their dreams. We are the guide in the forest with the machete chopping through the vines the players cannot get through. What’s at the end of the forest is not up to us, but we are dang sure going to help our players get to where that is.

I hope these analogies helped put our complex and sometimes difficult jobs into a different perspective. We work in the shadows and, at times, don’t get the recognition we deserve. But the moment that athlete has the house of their dreams or reaches the end of that forest, we know we had a hand into helping that person live out a dream.

Travel ball: Is it necessary to be successful?


Over the past few months, I’ve contemplated one of the most complicated topics in baseball.

Travel ball.

This multi-million dollar machine has watered down local rec leagues and become the preferred source of youth baseball. This expensive, multi-layered topic that is travel ball has caused the landscape of the kid’s game to change. As a parent, travel ball gives you the feeling like if you don’t join it, you are falling behind. If you can’t pay the money, drive the hours, and stay in the hotels then your kid won’t have a future in the sport. Parents stuck with these challenges have no definitive answer on what is right or wrong. So, I wrote this to help clarify and sort through them one by one. Some questions I aim to address in the article are:

Does travel ball help develop my son or daughter better than rec ball?

Is travel ball necessary for my son or daughter to play at the next level?

Does travel ball help with exposure and recruiting?

Does travel ball increase risk of injury?

But, before I jump into the state of the game today, it’s important to talk about how youth baseball began.

History of youth baseball

To know how we got to where we are, it’s important to go back to where it all began. Some people never take the time to learn how youth baseball came about. If I gave you one guess on what year organized youth baseball began what would you say?

Way back in the late 1800’s, adult “club” teams in New York formed and sponsored pre-teen leagues to give the younger kids a place to play. The problem with this was the equipment was all stuff made for the adult club teams. This included old broken bats and beat up gloves and balls. So, a good idea with poor execution led to these youth teams fizzling out. Can you imagine going to a travel tournament where all the kids were swinging adult sized bats and hitting ripped up balls? Most parents wouldn’t make it through the first game before pulling their kids out and going home.

It wasn’t until 1888 when William Buckingham Cutis founded the AAU (which I played in when I was 12). Cutis’ youth league was different, working close with the Olympic movement to prepare athletes for the Olympic Games. Baseball wasn’t in the Olympics back then, but having rules built the foundation for the development youth baseball that it lacked.

By the 1900’s, youth baseball started to pick up again. In 1925, the American Legion formed as the first baseball program to provide a national baseball tournament for teens. But, it wasn’t until 1938 when youth baseball had its official beginning all thanks to a man named Carl Stotz. Carl, like every other dad at the baseball field, just wanted a place for his young nephew to play. So, he decided to organize a league for him and the other kids in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (the present day site of the Little League World Series).

His goal of the league was to “teach young ball players the fundamentals of sportsmanship, fair play and the concept of teamwork”. Simple and straight to the point. We can all agree that even in today’s world that goal still applies. What followed Stotz’s idea of a place for the kids to play was a cascade effect of leagues across the country. The Pony League in 1950 by the Pennsylvania YMCA as an acronym for “Protect Our Neighborhood Youth” (later named “Protect Our Nation’s Youth”). The Babe Ruth League then came in ’51 as a league for youths from ages 13-18 who had grown past the Little League age limit of 12 to play on adult sized fields. Several leagues continued to form for different reasons. Each one has a very specific goal in mind and each one with the intention of getting more kids to play the game of baseball.

The rise of travel baseball

Yet, with all these leagues in place, still somehow, there was room for more new organizations. This included the USSSA (United States Specialty Sports Association) and Perfect Game. These orgs now required traveling further distances to face better competition. This, in turn, is supposed to accelerate development to a greater degree than rec ball. This all sounds great, until the bill comes.

The price to pay to play for a travel team? It depends. Teams can range from a couple hundred dollars a “season” to a couple thousand. Yes, I said per season. A season is a batch of tournaments that the organization has committed to playing in for the upcoming few months. Each team requires you to pay for the upcoming season and then requires another payment upon the next season beginning. Business minded travel orgs can then create as many “seasons” as possible in a calendar year to maximize their profit.

But what does this money go to each season? Team fees? Hotels? Uniforms? Baseball stuff? It’s true that to enter into bigger tournaments, you have to pay bigger fees as a team. But, according to IRS filings in 2015, the USSSA generated $13.7 million and the CEO received $831,200. $831,200. So, when an organization like USSSA says to your team “pays this fee”, the coach then turns to parent and says “I need this amount of money for this fee”. If Perfect Game raises a price, it comes out of the parents pockets not the coach’s. Yet, if the coach decides to make nicer uniforms, that comes out of the parents pockets too. As a parent, it can feel like more and more every year. All for what? Guaranteed college scholarships?

The sales pitch here is that by playing in bigger tournaments you are facing better competition. By playing in front of college/professional scouting departments, you increase your exposure. But how does a parent verify if that’s even true? How can you really know that the money you are spending each year is going into further developing your kid? How can we MEASURE that? If he runs, hit, and throws like everyone else that plays rec ball what is the extra money for travel ball for? Not to mention what about all the extra pressure paying that much money as a family puts on these younger kids?

In a 2016 study, Dorsch and his colleagues found the more money families pour into youth sports, the more pressure their kids feel (1). They also enjoyed less and felt less committed to their sport. At such young ages kids are being taught to be serious because there’s money on the line now. Don’t laugh, don’t fall down, don’t strike out because we are counting on you to make good on our money we spent. Kids respond one of two ways: step up and play well or the more likely scenario “I don’t want to play this game anymore”. Gone are the days of wiffle ball in exchange for a semi-professional version for 7-14 year olds. But does it even help more than the local rec league?

Does it help more than rec ball?

Let me preface my answer first by saying I loved rec ball. I hit a home run off of one of my best friends. I threw my first no-hitter. I played on a team full of kids from my school and we won a city championship. We had local team names from businesses we all knew. My brother beat a team that named after a local bank that had the best players on it. I got to see my older brother throw one of the best games of his life. When the games were over, we ran to the concession stand for hot dogs and a coke. If my baseball career stopped after that, I would’ve always those memories. I loved baseball because of that league. My parents didn’t have to drive far and the cost was much less than travel ball. So, was that local rec ball league the reason I played college baseball? No. But would driving three hours away to a tournament every weekend been any better? Definitely not.

It’s not fair to compare my experiences with kids today. The mass exodus of talented players from local rec leagues makes it a shell of what it was for me as a kid. In the 90’s, lots of good athletes played rec ball during baseball season because we could play the other sports the rest of the year. The league was stacked with talent making every game helpful in our development. We didn’t need to go out of town to face faster pitching because it was there. Home runs were hit every game, so we never sought out tougher competition. Now, you are lucky to find more than a few kids in each league that can hit a ball over the fence. Parents turn their nose up to rec ball because it’s become the league for kids that don’t have the option to play anything else. Quality coaches are exiting the rec ball scene to either watch or coach their kids travel ball teams. This leaves rec ball scrambling to find someone to coach and hardly able to fill more than a few teams. In turn, it’s more of a mess than a game of baseball.

Unfortunately, to get quality reps off of more difficult competition, travel ball is the way to go. However, I think the way that travel ball is set up for young kids it can be more hurtful than helpful. Do you face better pitching sometimes? Yes. Do you also face the same quality as rec ball at times? Also yes. Mixed in with average competition, you also have the issue of being forced to play 5-7 games in a 2 day span. Why on earth do we think it’s a good idea for a roster of 10-12 kids to have to play 7 games in a weekend? Don’t we have a better understanding that these are not fully grown adult bodies? Most of these kids don’t even have growth plates that have closed. Yet, we think it’s a great idea to structure tournaments to dehydrate, create muscular damage, and a lack of sleep before school on Monday in an effort to get better?

Before I go further, it’s important to discuss what makes a kid “good” at a young age. Is it that they are just more skilled than others? Is it that they just work harder than others? Unfortunately, at young ages no matter how much you practice that doesn’t change the fact that Body weight (mass) is the biggest differentiator at younger ages. The more mass you have behind the swing/throw, the easier it is to have success on the small field. Now, as kids get older, differences in body weights shrink and skill level becomes the separator. This can also lead to setting kids up for failure down the road. Kids who were bigger at younger ages may not feel the need to practice as hard. The skinnier, smaller kids may have learned to work harder because they were behind and set a better foundation for when they are older. So, 8-12 year old baseball is really a strange time to push championships and winning on kids over developing skills and building a foundation that will help them move forward on the big field.

Are they ready for THIS type of baseball?

I was introduced to travel ball when I was about 12 years old after my dad and a few other parents decided to put a team together. We had a group that would enjoy playing a few more weekends per year. We practiced a few times a week and only drove a few hours away. Practices consisted of developing the group of local kids into a team. I still remember my dad saying “This is for the state championship” before he would hit the last fly ball or ground ball of the practice. Our goal was never a travel baseball trophy. We were developing into a team prepared for the big moments. In our last year of high school baseball, a majority of those kids were on our team when we won a huge playoff game. It felt like we had been practicing for that game since we were 12 on that travel ball team. Again, the goal was to develop into a team not to win a travel ball trophy.

It wasn’t until I was 16 that a team from outside of my area code reached out to my parents and asked me if I would be interested in playing for them. By that time, I had decided baseball was the sport for me and that it gave me the best opportunity to play at the next level. This team played in front of collegiate recruiters in big tournaments out of state. It was something I had never experienced until my senior year in high school. I say that because kids that haven’t even started playing on 90′ bases have already played more out of state tournaments than I did by the time I was 16. 10-year-old kids are being put into high pressure situations in a game where you fail more often than not. Are they ready for it? Are the you ready for it as a parent? Do they even have the brain function to comprehend what it means to work for something that won’t come to fruition for years?

I strongly believe that kids at younger ages are not ready for this type of competitiveness. If the environment for travel ball was encouraging and coaches helped kids through struggle, my answer would be different. Instead, it’s parents yelling at kids for getting out in a game where you get out a lot more than you don’t. It’s coaches putting kids lower in the lineup after their batting average drops. It’s yelling on the way home from games, during practice, at home because kids have to perform right now. So, no, young kids are not ready for that. A kid in high school has more personal skills to handle failures and can make his or her own decision if this is the path for them going forward. Young kids, however, are told to like a sport and be committed to playing it for a whole year. If we as coaches, parents, adults can make it more positive and encouraging during the inevitable struggles than travel ball can serve a purpose. But, if it leads to arguments among parents and a strain on families both financially and creating more stress than is the juice worth the squeeze at young ages?

Is it necessary to play at the next level?

This is a resounding no. Easy answer for me given the fact I’ve been able to see so many minor league baseball players and asked them firsthand, “Did you play travel baseball?” This question gets a lot of yes answers. But, occasionally, you get a, “No, I played football and basketball until my last year of high school when I decided to try out for varsity baseball.” If travel baseball was the only way to play college baseball how do multi-sport athletes get there?

Let’s take a closer look at football. A sport comprised of strength, speed, agility, and power. As a young football player, you learn to sprint at high speeds and change directions on a dime. You have to be strong and powerful, and you have to have the necessary footwork to stay off the ground. Amateur baseball scouts are looking for tools when they watch showcases. Sprint speed, arm speed/strength, bat speed/power, hand eye coordination (glove), and the ability to hit are all tools that will be sought out. A player that possesses even one of these elite tools can be drafted based off of the ability for the scout’s team to help cultivate the rest. Pro organizations believe in their coaching staffs. They will take their chances coaching a player that already has elite sprint speed because it’s unique. You can learn to field a ground ball, but sprinting faster than everyone else is rare.

So, going back to travel ball. If the five tools are what gets you further, how much does it help enhance those tools? Does playing in a game every weekend help your son or daughter run faster, throw faster, field better, hit further? If your son or daughter lacks the foundational strength that answer is no. A pitcher with no lower body or core strength that continues to throw 59 mph for two years isn’t being “scouted”. If you’re a Toyota Prius, driving it more won’t give it a bigger engine. Taking time in the gym instead of playing will. This is what leads to gains in throwing velocity, bat speed, and sprint speed. More weight room time, way less game time. What about defense and swing work? If that’s below average will playing more fix that? This takes individual work to increase those skills. Money spent on travel tournaments would be better served paying for a coach to teach these skills outside of competition. So, travel ball is not necessary to play at the next level as long as you are developing one or all the five tools as much as possible.

Now, what about a player with above average tools that has strength and power as well as the skill to perform? That player needs more game reps! This is where travel ball fills a need. This player has the potential to be great and is a sports car in the garage. This player should be out on the field improving their game decisions and applying what they know and possess into a competitive setting. See? Not against travel ball, but it needs to be for the right person. If your son or daughter has the horsepower of a Prius, they are not hitting the ball very far no matter how many Perfect Game tournaments they play in. But if your kid has tremendous power and needs to see more live pitching, go for it. As a parent, you need to be honest and assess the situation instead of paying the money expecting something to happen. Develop speed, agility, strength, and power first and then play in games that showcase those things.

Does it help with exposure or recruiting?

I can answer this using what was already discussed. Does your kid throw a collegiate level speed? Does your kid run at a professional level? Does he have a better swing than most kids in the county? If these answers are yes, travel baseball can help draw more attention to the tools each kid already has. If your kid is throwing 62 mph, what would the extra exposure do? College and pro scouting departments have a budget that allows for each evaluator to travel to tournaments. That scout needs to eat, sleep, and drive to places. Scouting departments need to know exactly where to go to maximize efficiency. Knowing this, do you think that scouts drive to tournaments watch every game on every field? They work off of preferred list of players that already have commitments or gained interest at some point.

If you see scouts at a game, they are there to watch specific players that already have shown the possibility of playing at the next level. If your kid happens to be around those players and runs a 3.8 to first base, you may be in luck. If your son throws 70 mph in a high school tournament, chances are that scout has already seen a thousand kids throwing 70 mph. If your travel team promises to get your son noticed but does nothing to improve his throwing velocity in two years, stop wasting money. That money could’ve gone to a gym membership and a private instructor that would’ve given you back two fold what you paid. Now, with that increased throwing velocity, you can go to a showcase and have a better chance of getting a call. It’s about developing the athlete first, then building the skills to gain attention.

So, does travel ball help with recruiting? Only if you meet the requirements that a scout is looking for. If not, spend the time working to develop those things before you go back into that realm.

Does travel ball increase risk of injury?

This, without a doubt, is a yes. More innings equals more opportunities for something to happen. Please don’t confuse that with WILL happen. More games only mean that the probability goes up. Throwing more innings gives the arm more chances to break down, so on and so forth. But don’t just take my word for it, there are a ton of studies backing this guy’s opinion. In 2011, Fleisig et al. published a study following 481 youth pitchers for a 10-year span (2). In this study, they found pitching more than a 100 innings per year significantly increases the risk of injury. In fact, pitchers that threw more than a 100 innings per year are 3.5 times more likely to be injured.

Travel baseball allows pitchers to throw more in a given calendar year. Some youth pitchers throw in their rec ball leagues as well as two or three other travel baseball teams. This causes inning counts to grow especially if you factor in bullpens and other throws made at other positions. I remember throwing 3 innings in a travel ball game and then starting in the next game 30 minutes later. In total, I threw 10 innings in a row and couldn’t straighten my arm the next day. That year started what would be a few years of arm injuries for me. I went from throwing with no pain to battling arm fatigue and pain. If mismanaged, travel baseball can add more stress to the arm and bring injury closer to fruition. But, if mapped out correctly and a plan is put into place, injury risk can be mitigated. Baseball at younger ages is about development and not winning. Before you commit the money to participate, talk with each coach about their plan for your kid’s arm. Once the season begins, make sure they adhere to it throughout the season to allow for healthy years down the road.

Is my kid getting left behind?

At the end of the day, this is the question every parent struggles with. Am I helping to set my son or daughter up for success? Everyone else seems to be doing it and I don’t want to hurt my kid’s chances. But is your kid getting left behind if you don’t play for a few years? Well first, it’s important to point out that whether you play or don’t at the youth level, around 2% of high school athletes go on to play Division I sports. Even if you play every single year on the very best team money can buy, those are the facts. Maybe it increases your likelihood of being in that 2%.

Again, I played in travel baseball since I was 12 years of age, and was fortunate enough to play college baseball. But, I also played high school golf, basketball, and football. It’s true that if you play other sports you develop more athletic qualities than those who do not. I believe long-term development should be an athlete first approach. Less playing games in a single sport and more about developing as an athlete. So, if you decide to play travel ball does your kid miss out on playing another sport? If so, you may be helping in the short term but hurting in the long term. Taking a break from baseball in no way hurts your kid in the grand scheme of things at young ages. However, taking time off of competitive sports altogether could possibly hinder future goals. You are more likely to be left behind at the high school level if you only focus on baseball versus the athletic kid who plays multiple sports and never burns out from baseball.

Younger ages benefit from more reps of every sport. If those reps are from basketball, you are getting agility, explosiveness, teamwork, playing a role within a group. If you can play catch in the backyard a few times a week during basketball season, you are golden. Plus, spending time in another sport will make that kid appreciate baseball even more when he or she comes back. If your kid is somewhere competing against good athletes, rest assured baseball is not leaving them behind. As your child gets older, it becomes more important that they begin taking more reps in a specific sport. By the age of 14, it’s time to start spending a majority of time on 1-2 sports only and placing all the eggs in those baskets.

So who is travel ball for?

Travel baseball is being packaged and sold as the optimal way to get better at the sport. Hitters see faster pitching; pitchers face better hitters. Iron sharpening iron, right? Gaining these experiences would then give motivation needed to aspire to be better. Some coaches tell parents they are going to “help develop each kid so that they have a better chance of playing at the next level”. For that, just pony up a couple thousand dollars a year and little Johnny is on the road to success.

But how can parents be sure you are receiving what you paid for? How do you measure “developing each kid to have a better chance at playing at the next level”? In any sales industry, if I tell you that a product is worth $3,000, wouldn’t you want to make sure you get what you are paying for?” At a car lot, you pay a price and you get that specific car. In a barber shop, you pay for a haircut and receive the haircut. These examples are transactional. Travel baseball, however, sells a product that takes years to come to light, if ever. So why the high fees for something that isn’t guaranteed?

I think travel baseball can be very beneficial for some athletes. The question is, is it right for YOU the specific reader. Would money spent on travel ball be better spent on private instruction? Would going on a non-sport related vacation this summer set your son or daughter back? Would spending money on a strength & conditioning coach to gain velocity be more beneficial than pitching more innings at the same velocity?

In my opinion, travel ball is set up for kids that have the physical qualities ready to play at higher levels. These are also kids with good work ethic, confidence, are coachable, and demonstrates leadership. Kids much younger need reps, strength training, and skill development. Will travel ball have some fun times? Absolutely. Will the younger kids get better because they play more? Definitely. But a couple grand on travel baseball at younger ages isn’t necessary. Good quality reps can happen in the backyard or at the local field. Playing other sports may end up being more productive for baseball than actually playing baseball at young ages. Chances are your son or daughter will become a better athlete and have more tools to show down the road. If a travel ball structure is setup to allow for 2-3 games in a weekend, I support that 100%. This would mean that pitchers wouldn’t “have” to throw multiple times and we aren’t crushing kids to the point of exhaustion. Let them get their work in and then get home/fed/recovered.

Thank you for following along during this long form article. I have thought for a long time about this topic and decided that in order to voice my opinion, I would need it to be organized. I have worked at the professional level and have now worked with young athletes for the last year. It has been an eye opener for me and I see a very complicated landscape with difficult topics. I do not believe my answers are the only, and hope that I’ve provided enough evidence to help parents sift through the noise. With this, maybe you can make a more educated decision with your money. After all, it is your money and you shouldn’t feel pressured into spending it something. In the future, I plan on answering more difficult questions such as:

“Should young kids lift weights”?

“Is it too soon to learn an offspeed pitch?”

“Should my son be hitting the ball on the ground or the air?”

“Should we work on throwing strikes before throwing hard?”

Stay tuned and share this article if it was helpful or can help someone you know.

References:

1. Ryan Dunn, C., Dorsch, T.E., King, M.Q. and Rothlisberger, K.J. (2016), The Impact of Family Financial Investment on Perceived Parent Pressure and Child Enjoyment and Commitment in Organized Youth Sport. Fam Relat, 65: 287-299. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12193

2. Fleisig, G. S., Andrews, J. R., Cutter, G. R., Weber, A., Loftice, J., McMichael, C., Hassell, N., & Lyman, S. (2011). Risk of Serious Injury for Young Baseball Pitchers: A 10-Year Prospective Study. The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 39(2), 253–257. https://doi.org/10.1177/0363546510384224

Separating yourself as a young athlete

When people talk about how to be the best, the phrase “separate yourself” is often thrown out there.

“If you want to do x, you have to do y to separate yourself.”

I’m a big fan of a young athlete putting work in to stand out when the game starts. I’m an even bigger fan of an athlete when they spend time learning their craft.
I’m not a fan of weightless words.

Phrases get past down from generation to generation with no substance behind them. Sayings that you hear trying to elicit motivation with no road map to get to where you want to go. That’s like a coach telling his or her players to go 5 hours away without giving directions. If they wanted the whole team to arrive at the destination, wouldn’t they want to give as much detail as possible? If you are someone that says, “work to separate yourself from the crowd”, ask yourself one question. Am I providing a road map to my staff or team to do what I’m asking?

We are in a strange time where tons of information is accessible with a simple google search. With that, there has been an influx of the “expert”. As more people gain a platform to speak, there are going to be more ineffective communicators. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great people to follow out there. But, as information becomes more accessible, there is an increased need for ways to process it.

Stepping off of my soapbox now. Back to the point at hand.

In this age of information, we are seeing athletes at younger ages become more educated. Kids at the ages of 12-14 years know way more about their swings than those before them. YouTube has detailed videos for any skill you want to learn. If you want to “separate yourself”, there are so many ways in which you could pursue a route to do so. I want to highlight a few specific ones to help reduce the noise and give something actionable.

Read “Atomic Habits” by James Clear

First, I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t recommend that you follow James Clear. His message is excellent. I am not affiliated with him in any way and do not make any profits by telling you to go check out his book “Atomic Habits”. Still, I am pushing every coach or parent to read and get their team to read this book. The reason being that the message is easy to understand and gets to the point. Without spoiling the book, it talks about the importance of having a routine. It digs into the science behind getting better and helps you know how to get to wherever you want to go. When I finished the book I thought “okay, I know what I need to do”. That’s what we want out of coaching, right? Reading a book means nothing unless it helps lead to action. Check it out and gets your process started.

The Generalist vs The Expert

Next, let’s talk about being an expert versus being a generalist when learning. If someone tells you to make yourself stand out, we usually associate that with doing something extraordinary. If I can jump the highest or run the fastest, I will definitely stand out from my peers. While true, what are the chances you’re the most gifted person in your sport or industry? What if you’re like most folks that don’t have the highest IQ or throw record breaking velocities? Are you stuck with where you are forever? Heck no. In this scenario, you can separate yourself by being competent at a lot of things your company or team values. Our culture has propped up the “expert” to the point of exhaustion and saturation. Now, everyone who reads a book on a topic labels themselves at expert level. What used to take craftsmen decades of apprenticeship to learn is now given away after a weekend course. This is not the way.

If you want to stand out in a saturated market of experts, be the person who does well in any situation. Be a swiss army knife that can handle anything that comes your way with effectiveness. Instead of being the fastest person on the team, be a balanced hitter that plays great defense and leader in the dugout. A person that can do many things is as valuable in a company as the person that does one thing well. We idolize Michael Jordan and Lebron James because they can do everything. They were so good that they owned the floor, not the one shooting guard or small forward position. Sports offer so many avenues to be great that by limiting yourself to one thing, you box yourself into a corner. To stand out, I say widen your foundation.

Outwork Everyone

Last, I want to pass on something the best coach (my dad) ever taught me. There is no substitute for hard work. It’s true, some people are more gifted than you and might get more opportunities than you at a certain thing. But if you want to succeed at a sport, you will be wise to focus on the things you can control. Your effort and mindset will always be a controllable variable. If you hit a hard line drive and it goes right to an outfielder, you can only control how you react to it. You can control how you help your teammates after that line drive and how you carry yourself on the jog back to the dugout. Make the things you say to yourself positive and keep your gaze on outworking everyone you see. Putting effort into something will always hold it’s value no matter how much technology and society evolves.

With these three things, any young athlete should be able to take a giant leap in the right direction. Be a student of whatever sports or subjects interest you.

  1. Build a routine
  2. Be good at a couple things
  3. Outwork everyone

Which of the three things do you struggle with the most? I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below. Check us out on social media we use for different forms of communicating information.

One thing the top performing athletes have in common

I get this asked this question more frequently than any question about specific exercises, types of workouts, ways to throw harder or run faster.

This type of question exists because we need to know the mystery.

What do the best athletes in the world do to make them so great?

If you were looking for the sexy answer, sorry to disappoint you. After watching the most talented players work towards being the greatest at their respective sports, I have found a common theme. These athletes have a process that they repeat every single day. I’m talking a specifically outlined, adapted over time, easy to follow process that starts from the moment they wake up until the moment their head hits the pillow.

Common things this process includes:

  • Prioritizing sleep, nutrition, adequate hydration, mobility
  • Being on time to each part of the day
  • Having clear defineable things to work on for that day
  • Staying laser focused and relentless in pursuit of their goals

Once you peel back the curtain, you realize that most of your favorite players aren’t just incredibly gifted. Sure, they have the talent that separated them from their town or county while growing up. But to survive and thrive in a group of other incredibly gifted athletes you need more than talent. It does not look like one of those YouTube videos narrated by a motivational speaker. Morgan Freeman isn’t talking while you foam roll at 6 am. Sometimes it’s a boring tv show nobody would watch. It’s waking up at 5 am to go to the park. It’s taking your same swings in the cage that you took the previous 100 days building trust in your coaches and in your swing. It’s groundhog’s day being in the same clubhouse around the same teammates doing the same schedule. Sometimes it’s easier to think there’s a secret formula to hacking great performances. But in my experience, most of the best just do the little things and do them everyday for longer.

Imagine if I told a group of people to do something that would definitely make you a better athlete in 150 days if you would just follow it everyday for 25 minutes. How many of those people would follow through the 150 days? How many would stop here and there and pick it back up again a week later? Would you be consistent all 150 days? Be honest. How many in that group have the discipline to maintain that kind of focus and determination? In my experience, less than you would expect. Most people are fueled by motivation. Motivation is a bad fuel source on it’s own because it’s fleeting. Running purely on motivation is like racing a speed boat to your end goal. Talented young players are so far away from becoming a superstar that the speed boat runs out of gas before they get there. Now stranded and lacking motivation, most athletes decide it can’t be done and swim back to the shore. Superstars don’t run on motivation by itself. Most of them have an endless supply of fuel that drives them. By focusing on their process, they aren’t looking so far ahead that they realize how far they have yet to go. They ride at that slow and steady pace knowing exactly where they are going no matter how long it takes to get there. When they finally do, they aren’t surprised because they have spent all that time laying the bricks to what is now a sturdy house.

I hope some young athletes can read this and understand that it’s not about the days you feel great and decide to go hit for an hour. It’s definitely not on the days you play in front of your town under the lights. The difference between the good and great players is on the days you don’t feel like doing anything. When there’s a big party and your friends want to skip out on the cage work and leave early what do you do? If the cage work is a part of your process that you do every single day do you skip it? Do you decide to stay but rush through it? This is the separator. This is common theme I see among superstars. They put in the boring work when exciting stuff is going on around them. They lay the foundation for something better to come.

So how can you improve your process?

  1. Find out what you need to work on.
  2. Detail in writing how you are going to improve on those things.
  3. Attack them with a plan that goes for at least 3 months.
  4. Do this every day with laser focus not letting up until the time period you decided in step 3 is done with.
  5. Re-assess after that time period and continue the process with better understanding.

Throwing Harder, Running Faster, Jumping Higher

Athletic potential is the pre-requisite for high level competition. Past that, it’s about who has put in the most time improving their skill.

If you have some skill and some talent, you can’t waste an opportunity by letting others outwork you. Plain and simple.

Young athletes that want to:

  • Throw a ball harder and farther
  • Hit a ball harder and farther
  • Jump higher
  • Run faster

This information was made for you. I created Peak Sports to provide the best quality training service and focus on the specific feats of strength and power that are the separator between good and great. I believe the role of a strength and conditioning coach is there to support the players goals and align my thoughts and goals with the team. Through training for better mobility, gaining strength, and becoming more fit you will be able to hone your skills to a greater degree.

Some questions I know will eventually come up from training online:

  • How do things change if I work with you remotely rather than in-person? Communication is extremely important. All you would need is filming capabilities on a phone or device.
  • How much is each individual program? Currently around $50-$100/month.
  • Do you have a detailed plan on how to get me closer to my goals? Yes.
  • Can I follow your blog and get information for free? Yes.

I believe in order to help an athlete reach success, you need to improve mobility, increase strength and force output, and monitor fitness levels to ensure they can practice for as long as the coaching staff requires to get better.

Force output is key. If you can’t put force into the ground, you are going to rely solely on skill and eventually reach a point where everyone around you has both skill and physical capabilities. Michael Jordan hired a strength coach to bulk up and help him reach a greater level. If the one of the greatest athletes of all time believed it could take him to higher levels, what’s stopping you?

Hitting an object harder is possible if you are able to generate more force into the ground, rotate at a faster speed, and move with more efficient motion. Jumping higher starts with more force into the ground. Throwing harder is a combination of generating force, transferring it efficiently, and practicing the skill. All these feats of athleticism start with one thing. If you stink at generating force, the ball isn’t going anywhere fast. Hitting in the cage, throwing with a friend, running sprints are all essential things that will help with gaining strength and power. But throwing a 5 oz baseball over and over will only do so much for your total body strength.

The point is this: It’s time to train

Make the decision to get serious and start the process towards dominating.